'Equus': Film of a Different Color

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: October 17, 1977

When "Equus," Peter Shaffer's psychological mystery play, was originally staged on Broadway, I was inclined to credit its great emotional impact to the stunning performances by Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth and to the spectacular, highly stylized theatrical effects devised by Mr. Shaffer and John Dexter, who directed the production. On stage, "Equus" was a breathtaking experience of light, sound, performance and text, more or less, I thought, in that order of importance. Later, however, when I saw other actors take over the leads, the production suffered hardly at all.

My problem, though, doctor, is that as much as I respect Mr. Shaffer's script (and his screenplay), I like being distracted by dazzling theatricality. Indeed, I prefer it.

This new "Equus," which opened yesterday at the Trans-Lux East, is probably about as good as one can get on film. It represents intelligent decisions. It's beautifully, sometimes almost grandly acted, by Richard Burton as the troubled psychiatrist attempting to bring back to sanity a young man who, in a fit of furious passion, has blinded six horses in a riding stable where he worked.

Peter Firth repeats his stage role as the boy, with Joan Plowright as his mother, Colin Blakely as his dad, Eileen Atkins as the judge who brings the boy to the doctor's care and Jenny Agutter as the pretty girl who indirectly triggers his furious breakdown. There's not a thoughtless or uninteresting performance in the film.

Mr. Lumet manages to suggest some of the play's theatricality in the up-tempoed pacing of these performances and by retaining the doctor's agonizing monologues as speeches spoken directly to the camera. Yet something is missing—specifically, our need to use our imaginations to fill in the visual and emotional gaps in the stories of Dr. Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist, and Alan Strang, his patient.

Although Mr. Shaffer's screenplay does not differ in any marked way from the play, the film seems to exclude us by doing all the work for us. It shows and tells us everything there is to know about the doctor and his patient. In great plays, what happens offstage demands our attention as much as anything that happens on.

In Mr. Lumet's "Equus," there's no such thing as an off-screen space, no privacy that we can invade, in effect, at our own risk. Everything mentioned in the play's text, or recalled through a mimed, re-created moment, happens front and center, on the screen. The movie exhausts us with information. We see the unhappily married doctor with his dentist wife, though everything we have to know about her and their relationship is carefully evoked in dialogue or monologues. The images are redundant.

We are shown young Alan's bedroom at home, a sacred place where he created his private religion devoted to the worship of Equus, the vengeful, demanding horse-god. When Alan takes off on his clandestine midnight rides—his psychosexual communion rites—we watch a naked young man riding a real horse bareback through a real countryside. We are as likely to worry about his catching pneumonia as to wonder about his emotional state.

What once was poetic and mysterious becomes, when seen in this literal detail, banal, anticlimactic.

Yet this may well seem like hairsplitting to anyone seeing "Equus" for the first time, for, behind all of this realistic scenery, the play remains intact, and it's a good one. It's the most interesting, most serious appraisal of psychiatry that we've ever had in a commercial film—an appraisal that probably has infuriated quite as many psychiatrists as it has pleased. It's the terrible suspicion of Mr. Shaffer's Dr. Dysart that, by removing Alan Strang's demons, by returning him to "normal" life, he has removed the boy's passion forever, emotionally lobotomized him.

Though the film is held together by the mystery of Alan Strang's behavior, the unraveling of which provides the narrative line, it's Mr. Burton's performance as the psychiatrist that dominates the movie, whether or not you agree with his fears that he cuts from his patients "their portions of individuality." This is the best Burton performance since "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" He receives excellent support, especially from Mr. Firth, but the film, which is otherwise in the siege of commonplace realism, becomes bigger than life in the presence of this self-mocking, troubled, still-searching miracle-worker.